


At last, to be identified!

by middlemarch



Category: The Hour
Genre: F/M, Gen, Homecoming, Marriage, Recovery, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-18
Updated: 2016-11-18
Packaged: 2018-08-31 18:19:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8588848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: There were no guarantees of domestic bliss, Freddie knew that, but this seemed promising.





	

Bel had insisted on a bed. It had been a strange sort of insistence, since she had also been exquisitely careful with him, the way she spoke, the way she touched him, with none of the nurses’ confidence or even Marnie’s impersonal politesse; each time her fingers grazed him he thought of wishes and all the ways people made them and how little he’d ever thought that would apply to him. She’d grown a little more relaxed as the days passed and he was clearly going to live, more after the letter from Camille had come, just this side of cruel in the timing of her declaration, but such a relief he’d slept for three blissful hours without morphine needed to subdue his normally frantic brain and woken to find Lix sitting beside him, nibbling at the biscuits Marnie had left. Marnie had no plans to return to ITV so her culinary exploits were a daily offering and made him a favorite of the nurses; he’d been too tired to bat his eyelashes, so he was glad of any help in winning over the white-capped and cardiganed Gorgons (he excluded the little student nurse who reminded him of Sissy when she first started, who’d vacillated between being terrified of his injuries and unexpectedly soothing, especially late at night when the ward smelled of the industrial cleaner they swabbed liberally on the lino and the shadows could hardly find a place to rest, skidding into corners).

When he’d been about to leave hospital, the doctors curiously unable to determine a day when they’d been so resolute about so many other things, he’d mustered up a version of the old Freddie, the one who had kissed her and then dashed off to the story and the suffering that had come after, that he’d underestimated, and asked her to come home with him. He hadn’t said _marry_ or _wife_ , though he’d rolled the words around before discarding them, watching her and needing her to say yes to what he asked. She’d said “Yes, of course” and he had repeated it so she would know what he really meant and she’d nodded; he saw how tired she was then, almost as much as he was, and how she didn’t notice the stitches on his face anymore but drew in a breath when she’d felt how thin he’d got as he put an arm around her in the car, his bones jostling her. She hadn’t clucked over him or talked about Isaac’s play, just sat silently beside him and then walked quietly up to the flat. Her heels sounded homely on the steps. The flat had been cleaned up, maybe Sissy, certainly not Camille who was never the archetypal French housewife, and the wine bottles were arranged martially by the window, catching the light on their green breasts. Bel had helped him take off his coat and sit on the sofa, put the kettle on and then taken the chair across from him. He wanted her to take off her shoes and tuck her feet up under her or come beside him and let him rest his head on her shoulder. They sat together and he thought he must say something before the whistle blew and startled them; he didn’t want a siren to be the first conversation in the home they would share but then Bel spoke.

“Freddie. I want to stay here, I will, but. I, we need a bed. A real bed,” she said. 

He imagined what she meant, a wide double bed with a clean eiderdown, pillows resting against a headboard and her woolly dressing gown draped upon the low post at the foot. Nothing bohemian or louche like the nest of sheets and blankets in his bedroom—that she accepted in the kitchen, the tea-cups printed with her reddest lipstick, pots on the draining board with a scum of stew in their depths, but where they would sleep, where they would be bare and give up all the secrets they knew of themselves, she wanted something clean and orderly to contain their own tension and chaos, a refuge and a start they’d never had with anyone else.

“Yes. We do. I’m not sure where though, to get a proper one—and the linens, though they’ll be easier to come by,” he replied and she smiled then. 

It wasn’t her old smile but he remembered that one and appreciated the change, the way her eyes rested on him with such obvious pleasure and her shoulders dropped without drooping. Marnie would have an idea of where to find a bed, she was someone who always knew that sort of thing, but it wouldn’t be kind to Bel to ask her to call, so they’d have to rely on what Lix could scare up and when he was better, just his right foot dragging and the headaches before tea, they could look in the shops or venture out into the country to find some charming antique; he’d buy anything she liked, but he’d prefer if someone had carved initials into a bedpost, to be able to stroke the grooves before getting into the bed, before he put a hand at her waist, slotted his stiff knees behind hers, whispered some Catullus into her hair, evoking her “hush!” with the right balance of irritable amusement and love.

**Author's Note:**

> Another post-canon look at what might have been, what Bel would need to help bridge that kiss and having been the other woman, again.
> 
> The title is from Emily Dickinson.


End file.
